All Chapters of The Replacement Wife : Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

CHAPTER 61: ELEANOR AND SOKOLOVI don't keep walking.I know, as soon as I stop, that I should. The acquisition bid is withdrawn. The building is behind me and the street is in front of me and the correct move is to get in the car and go home to my daughter.I turn around.Eleanor is already standing. She knew I would come back. Of course she knew. She has been watching me make decisions my entire life and she knows, better than almost anyone, that I can't walk away from a thing I haven't finished yet.The lobby is quieter than it was when I crossed it thirty seconds ago. The marble floor reflects the overhead lights in long pale streaks. Two people near the elevator bank are talking about something and not looking at us. Eleanor stands by the window with her bag over one arm and her expression arranged into something careful not quite neutral, not quite welcoming, the specific expression she uses when she is managing a situation she hasn't fully read yet.I stop in front of

CHAPTER 63: DOMINIC AND HIS FATHERVictor comes on a Saturday afternoon, three days after the resignation.He calls first. Dominic takes the call in the study, and I hear the conversation in the way I hear all conversations through that door muffled, insufficient, the tone more audible than the words. When Dominic comes out he says: "He'd like to come. Today, if that's alright."I say yes. It is Dominic's yes to give, not mine, but he says alright in the way he does when he is asking rather than informing, and I understand that he wants me in the house when it happens.He arrives at two. He is dressed for a visit rather than a meeting, no tie, the kind of jacket he wears on weekends, no briefcase. He looks, again, like a man who has put something down that he has been carrying for a long time. Not lighter. Just different in his posture. Like a person who has stopped bracing for something that has already hit.He and Dominic go into the study. I hear the door close.I stay in th

CHAPTER 65: SEBASTIAN VISITSSebastian calls at ten on a Wednesday morning to say he wants to come by. He does not say why. Sebastian rarely explains his reasons in advance. He arrives when he says he will and there is usually a reason by the time he leaves.He shows up at noon with a large flat package under his arm, wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine in the elaborate way he wraps things that matter to him. He's wearing paint-stained jeans and a jacket that looks like it survived something significant, and he has the expression he gets when he has been working hard on something and is now in the uncomfortable gap between finishing and showing it to someone.I know this expression because Dominic described it to me once. Sebastian in the days before he shows anyone new work. Quiet, slightly distracted, running on something other than whatever is in the room."Is it alright?" he says, holding the package."Now is fine."Mrs. Chen appears briefly, takes stock, and

CHAPTER 67: THE FELICITY PROBLEMDominic brings it up on a Sunday evening while we're doing the dishes.Not a strategic moment. Not a sit-down conversation with the table cleared and the intent announced. Just the two of us with the plates, the tap running, steam rising from the hot water, the sound of Felicity's footsteps upstairs in the guest wing and Helena already down for the night. The kind of conversation that starts because both people have been thinking about something and one of them finally says it out loud."She can't stay in the guest wing indefinitely," Dominic says. He is drying a glass. He says it looking at the glass. "Not because we want her to leave.""I know what you mean," I say.The dishes. The tap. The footsteps above us are going quiet.Dominic sets the glass down and picks up another one. "The Sokolov investigation is open now. Victor's testimony implicated the network. There are people in that network who don't know yet exactly how much Felicity co

CHAPTER 69: HELENA'S THREE MONTHSHelena Grace Laurent is three months old today.I know because I've been counting. Not obsessively, just the way you track something that matters in a new and ungovernable way, quietly, in the back of the mind where numbers live. Twelve weeks. Eighty-four days. Two thousand and sixteen hours, give or take, of a person who didn't exist before and now takes up more space in my life than everything that came before her.She is currently asleep in the carrier against my chest, which is where she likes to be in the late morning. I am sitting at the kitchen table with a report open on my laptop that I have been staring at for twenty minutes without reading, because the weight of her against my ribs is the most interesting thing in the room and my brain keeps choosing it over the quarterly figures.The weight is specific. That's the thing I couldn't have anticipated how specific it would be. The carrier weight is different from the arms weight. The